Congressional Democrats on Friday demanded that lawmakers act to protect special counsel Robert S. Mueller III after revelations President Trump sought to oust him last summer from overseeing the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Several Democrats and one moderate Republican called for votes on Senate legislation that would prevent presidents from firing special counsels unless a panel of three federal judges agreed with the move, citing the revelations that Trump came close to pushing out Mueller last June. The president backed off only after White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn threatened to quit, according to two people familiar with the episode.

In other words, what is essentially going on here is that Democrats want to bring back the Independent Counsel statute under a different guise. Which they rushed to abolish back in the Clinton years when they discovered to their horror that Independent Counsels could be used against Democrats. People just don’t get it: Independent Counsels were created as a tool to be used against Republican presidents, like Reagan and now Trump.

If I had time and inclination, I’d go back to all those liberal eulogies of Justice Scalia that grudgingly admitted that his dissent in the Morrison v. Olson case that upheld the constitutionality of the independent counsel statute back in the 1980s was actually quite prescient, given what they see as the disaster of Ken Starr. Like Lawrence Tribe’s recent pirouette over whether a sitting president can face criminal indictment while in office, get ready for liberals to forget all of that rectitude en masse.